Daily Archives: August 6, 2009

Confidence is slowly returning to the stock market and the S&P is back to the level it reached when President Obama took office in January. This is enough to prevent a further collapse in spending; the Obama stimulus package may even move us into positive territory for US gross domestic product growth. But these ‘green shoots of recovery’ are not enough to create the jobs needed to restore full employment in the US. Read more

“Why did no one see the crisis coming?” Queen Elizabeth asked last year. “A failure of the collective imagination of many bright people” who were all “doing their job properly on its own merit”, was the answer many of those bright people gave in a letter to the Queen last week.

If the economics profession could not warn the public about the credit crunch and the recession, what is the profession’s raison d’etre? Did this reflect, as some claim, that economics has gone astray with models that no longer help understand economic reality but rather distort it? Did such models even contribute to the crisis? FT writers and outside experts will set out their views in the posts below. What is the point of economists? What do you think? Click on the “comment” button to take part.